“I didn’t realize you had so much stuff,” Maxine said, when they’d looked through all the rooms.
“Oh I was a top-of-the-line obsessive. No question. And I was organized.” She went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and fingered through it till she found the file she wanted.
“What’s this?” Maxine said.
“Letters from you to me. Usually Dictated but not read.”
“I was a bitch, I know. I was just trying to protect him the only way I knew how.”
“And it worked. I never really got near him. Nobody did.”
“Maybe if I had been less paranoid, he’d have been less paranoid. Then we wouldn’t have tried to hide him away, and none of this — ”
Tammy interrupted her. “Enough of that,” she said. “Let’s start a bonfire out in the back yard, and get this done.”
“A bonfire? For what?”
“For things like these.” She proffered the Maxine Frizelle file. “Things it’s nobody’s business to ever see or read.”
“Is there much like that?”
“There’s enough. You want to start a fire with these, and I’ll bring some more stuff out?”
“Sure. Anywhere in particular?”
“Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never finished it. We could use that.”
“Done.”
Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets collecting up other files that for one reason or another she didn’t want people to see. She wasn’t proud of what her overbearing tendencies had led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up her past a little. It wasn’t so much the thought of posterity that drove her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the Appreciation Society who would come in here after they’d gone to cast dice and divide the lots.
When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.
“Is that all?”
“No, no,” Tammy said, studying the fire. “There’s a lot more.” She kept staring. “You know that’s what I used to think ghosts were like?” she said. “Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there.”
Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the flames.
“Are we ever going to set the record straight?” Tammy wondered aloud.
“Like how?”
“Write our own book.”
“Lauper and Frizelle’s Guide to the Afterlife?”
“Something like that.”
“It’d just be another opinion,” Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she’d picked up. “People would go on believing their favourite versions.”
“You think?”
“For sure. You can’t change people’s opinion about stuff like that. It’s imbedded. They believe what they believe.”
“I’ll go get some more stuff.”
“Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know that?”
“Probably,” Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.
Three or four trips out into the backyard and she’d done all she needed to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she’d always kept her special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room, where-hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills-was the holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of costuming, but not her precious photographs.
She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay hidden. Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box out into view.